The storm parted and the skies opened as night settled over the tundra. The troupe was back from its adventure, and the others emerged from their yurts, everyone gathering in starlight around a campfire.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Captain Ria Alleyne offered as she stared awestruck at the brilliant blues and greens that danced across the night’s sky. In her quest to heal the frontier, she had visited a hundred worlds, but the polar auroras of Colludia V were unlike anything she’d ever seen.
“There aren’t many worlds with a mesospheric ice haze dense enough to interact visibly with auroral emissions in this manner,” Commodore Olivia Larsen explained in a scholarly tone. “Layers of charged, electrostatically-aligned ice crystals that polarize and diffract primary excitations, producing a secondary pattern of chromatic fringes.”
“So this isn’t just a typical aurora effect?” Captain Anthony Knight asked, following along as a band of violet appeared between the green folds.
“Correct,” Commodore Larsen confirmed with a nod. “The atmosphere determines which wavelengths are emitted, just as with a traditional aurora, but the ice redistributes them according to angle and polarization. What we are seeing is components of the auroral spectrum separated spatially across the sky.”
“Don’t leave anything to mystery, do you, ma’am?” Commander Alonso Romero chuckled as he continued to stare upward.
“Mysteries exist to be solved, Commander,” Commodore Larsen said with a twinkle in her eye. That insatiable desire was what had brought her to the stars.
“But sometimes, it is okay to just look up and enjoy the moment,” Fleet Captain Gérard Devreux smiled gently as the luminous curtain shifted, its green center divided into a succession of finer bands. Violet gathered along one edge, and blue spilled across the other, each color separating and recombining as mesospheric currents shifted. For a moment, the aurora seemed as if it had acquired a second skin, a translucent lattice of spectral fringes sliding across the original light, moving with it, yet never quite in step.
Fleet Admiral Allison Reyes listened with quiet amusement, the inner battle between solving the galaxy and experiencing it all too familiar to her. It was good to see her team actually spending some time together, too, not racing to fulfill orders and save the day but actually just getting to know each other. Devreux had been right to force her begrudgingly into this retreat.
But as the aurora shifted once more, her eyes fell on the one officer who still sat alone, the newest among them, not selected by her but forced upon her. Rear Admiral Nikki Sharpe sat outside the circle and away from the others, participatory in her presence, but uninterested in the celestial fireworks or the casual conversation. Instead, so far back the fire hardly lit her face, she just seemed to be quietly observing them.
Fleet Admiral Reyes casually slid over to her. “You could at least pretend to be part of the team,” she offered quietly, too soft for the others to hear over the crackle of wood and the din of the conversation that carried on without her.
“Excuse me?” Rear Admiral Sharpe inquired as she raised an eyebrow. “I am, as you are certainly aware, a senior leader on this team.” In fact, save for Fleet Admiral Reyes and Commodore Larsen, everyone gathered around the campfire reported through her.
“An org chart does not make you a leader,” Fleet Admiral Reyes counseled. “You think they follow me through fire because my box is above theirs on some diagram in some office somewhere?”
“No, not at all,” Rear Admiral Sharpe replied. “They follow you, not for something so reasoned, but rather on belief and belief alone.” She tone was critical as she locked eyes with the older admiral. “And, you see, that’s the problem. You have created a cult out of them. You say jump, and they ask how far. They never even think to check where they’re going to land.” Or even if they’d land at all.
Fleet Admiral Reyes studied her. What was her angle? What was she getting at? It was something more than just a clash of leadership styles. “Ever since you’ve arrived, there’s been something unsaid between us.” The aurora above them darkened, just a tad, as if the sky itself had exhaled a breath. “I think it’s well past time you come out and say it.”
“I believe I was quite upfront with you,” Rear Admiral Sharpe replied flatly, recalling their first meeting in a temporary office aboard Archanis Station. She had been quite clear then, and she simply repeated it again: “I don’t like you, and I don’t like your methods.”
“Yes, that much is evident,” Fleet Admiral Reyes dismissed the response. “But why?” And then, as the rear admiral opened her mouth to reply, but before she could, the fleet admiral added, “And, this time, don’t give me platitudes about being reckless or dangerous.”
“But it’s true,” Rear Admiral Sharpe answered. “I’ve read your after-action reports.”
“You’re far too accomplished to be so naive as to believe a report fully captures the parameters of a mission,” Fleet Admiral Reyes corrected firmly.
“Of a mission?” Rear Admiral Sharpe retorted. “If it was a mission, or even a couple, I could overlook it, but it’s not. It’s a pattern.”
“I am where the galaxy needs me to be when it needs me,” Fleet Admiral Reyes replied firmly.
In her eyes, Rear Admiral Sharpe could see the fleet admiral really believed what she was saying, and that was a scary thought. “You seek it out.”
“If I didn’t, who would?” Fleet Admiral Reyes countered, unwilling to back down. “I do what must be done because someone has to.”
“You really think you’re that self-important?” Rear Admiral Sharpe could barely stop herself from laughing. “That the galaxy somehow needs you? That you’re the only one? That it’s the only way?” Her eyes narrowed. “That nothing else matters… not even the trail of bodies you leave behind?”
Fleet Admiral Reyes’ expression didn’t waiver, not because the rear admiral’s words didn’t hit a sore spot, but because she wouldn’t allow her the satisfaction of a reaction.
“You have lost more under your command than most will have the privilege of commanding at all in their entire life,” Rear Admiral Sharpe kept on. “Over two thousand in the last three years alone.”
“That’s what war does,” Fleet Admiral Reyes replied.
“No, that’s what you do, admiral,” Rear Admiral Sharpe shook her head. “You seek a cause for martyrdom, and then you ask others to martyr themselves for you.” She paused for a moment, and then decided it was time to put it all in the open. “When I introduced myself to you aboard Archanis, did my name jog any memories?”
Fleet Admiral Reyes looked at her, not following.
“I was there on the observation deck,” Rear Admiral Sharpe shared. She had travelled across three sector blocks for it. “To hear his name as the chief read it, as you stood there with your hand raised in a salute, a gesture I wonder even has any meaning still to you.”
But the fleet admiral, for her part, still didn’t know what Sharpe was talking about.
“William James Sharpe,” Rear Admiral Sharpe repeated back as Chief Salazar had read it fourteen months prior. “Lieutenant Commander, USS Serenity.”
And that’s when Fleet Admiral Reyes understood. She hadn’t recalled the name, and she hadn’t made the connection. Not until now. But that’s what this was. It was personal. “Was he your…” she began to ask, her tone softening, deliberately more gentle.
“My brother…” Rear Admiral Sharpe shared, her voice tapering off momentarily. “And a damn good engineer, one of the best Starfleet ever could have asked for… and you threw him away, just as you have done with countless others.”
Except she hadn’t. “Respectfully, Admiral Sharpe, that’s not how it happened,” Fleet Admiral Reyes clarified, balancing her tone carefully. “I did not throw him away, as you say. You see, it was us that responded to an urgent call to action from them. The Serenity was operating on its own, far from home, calling the shots in those dark moments. All we did was answer.”
“You may not have ordered it…” Rear Admiral Sharpe conceded. “But you moved the pieces on the board such that, when the time came, they would give themselves willingly.” It was the bigger picture, the man she’d put in charge, and the ideals she’d imbued upon them along the way.
“No,” Fleet Admiral Reyes corrected with firm conviction in her tone. “The crew of the Serenity, your brother included, gave their lives in a selfless act of their own free will, so others, those on the Ingenuity and those across the galaxy at large, would live to fight another day.”
“We would have won, eventually, with or without their sacrifice,” Rear Admiral Sharpe dismissed the idea. “Again you overstate your own personal importance. I was part of the team that did the final campaign analysis. The Vaadwaur blitzkrieg was abrupt, but ultimately, in every projection we developed… they eventually lost in every one of them, whether or not the Serenity, or any other individual ship, was lost.”
But as Fleet Admiral Reyes saw it, that’s where the Nikki Sharpe, in her desperation to find another answer, had missed something. “But how much more bloodshed would there have been first?” Her tone no longer soft or kind. It dishonored the memory of William Sharpe and all those aboard the Serenity to frame it any other way. “How many more lives lost? Your brother might still be here, sure, but how many other families would have been shattered as a result?” The Federation, by its very nature, would have prevailed eventually, but it would have been a far more prolonged conflict.
Rear Admiral Sharpe stared at her incredulously. “Who are you to lecture me about my brother?”
But Fleet Admiral Reyes, too, had lost the closest thing she had ever had to a brother aboard that ship. Captain Lewis and all those who’d stood beside him, they’d given themselves to protect the free peoples of the galaxy. “Admiral Sharpe, your brother and all those aboard the Serenity, they died as heroes who answered the call when the galaxy needed them most. That’s how they deserve to be remembered.”
“Respectfully, ma’am, that’s where we differ,” Rear Admiral Sharpe replied flatly. “You believe they should be remembered. I believe they should be alive.”
